Thanks Vista! (Yeah Right!)

When my old laptop died I bought a new one, it took me 10 mins to swap
the hard drive from the old laptop into the new one and then as usual
the first time it booted XP fine, just to show me that all my stuff was
there and that it was possible. Then XP installed a heap of drivers and
gave me a BSOD. On the next restart it locked up part way through
boooting (no doubt windows saw the hardware change and went into
punishing mode) and managed to hose the MBR for the disk. Painless
upgrade with windows? Perhaps buy a bigger house in the country but
forget anything from Microsoft.
So the new laptop came with Vista, I had only heard bad things about
Vista but decided perhaps they were unfair and I should give it a go.
Nothing good anyone says about Vista is true, in every way it is less
good than XP, less fast, less stable, less easy to use, less useful,
less predicable, less compatible, less customisable, in short it is
crap, complete crap. And I urge everyone to avoid it like the plague for
your own wellbeing and productivity's sake. I suffered it for a couple
of months on the road, not having a fast enough internet connection to
be able to setup a proper linux alternative on my laptop. It was hell. I
hate Microsoft for what they just put me through, it was stupid and
pointless. Lets face it windows 95 was crap, 98 was crap that we knew
better and put up with, NT was predictable crap which had a use, 2000
was the best crap so far, XP was initially a shock to most as after SP2
came out it became fast and stable and actually quite useful. I switched
from Mac to XP because XP was nearly as good and had a much cheaper
total cost if you built your own hardware and knew how to make it behave
well.
I begrudgingly had to admit to people for years that XP was OK. Given
that I use Apple a measuring stick this is high praise indeed,
especially for their arch nemesis Microsoft. But Vista is such an insult
to the intelligence of a seasoned computer user, it is such a fine
example of everything that is wrong at Microsoft, it is so rude and
callous I feel personally slighted by Bill, I am offended and he and his
OS can get stuffed.
I learnt to love linux as Debian during my days as a builder and
maintainer of servers and networks. I learned that it was as reliable as
the rising sun and that if you left it alone it would never break, that
it only broke when you broke it and that it could do and learn anything,
you were the limitation with your puny IT foo. I used debian on my
personal machines out of respect for what was underneath, cos lets face
it the GUI was horrible and unintuitive and mostly broken. When Ubuntu
was born I heard and saw the shining star straight away, here was Debian
but with manners, dressed in a pretty dress and with make-up on. And
after a few years of being just OK it has arrived. I installed Hardy
using the WUBI loader right from my Vista desktop. It worked perfectly
from the first second. I had to learn a little about Ndiswrappers to get
the wireless card going, but everything else was setup perfectly out of
the box, it left Vista for dead, and its free.
In the last 2 weeks in my spare time I have customised my linux
experience and now I run my favourite XP games faster than vista or XP
using wine, I was amazed to find just how many programs work under wine
now. I like Thunderbird and can access my Gmail contacts via LDAP, I
like Firefox and use Gmarks to store all my bookmarks, I manage my Ipod
music with gtkpod, I have MY old copy of XP paused in Suns virtualbox
and I can be at a full screen XP environment in a second if I need to
run some Windows program. No more dual booting required. I have yet to
try and edit and burn a DVD but thats just because I have not needed to
yet. I can't wait to see how easy that has become. Open Source Rules.
Really I don't need to thank Vista for making move to Ubuntu, I should
be thanking the Open Source movement and all the people out there who
use it and contribute to it by developing software or using/testing it
and helping it get to where it is now.